Get to Know a Local Poet: Jack McCarthy

The first time I heard Jack McCarthy was several years ago in Bellingham, Washington. Poetry Night was having their monthly slam, and there were an assortment of fairly well-versed performers, generally flashy, young things drawing heavily on pop culture, hip hop and the sort of sex-life revelations often saved for therapists.

Then there was this guy Jack who had a good few years on everyone at the slam, and he started, in slow, measured pacing, telling us a story about his car. My friend leaned over to me and said, “This guy’s a legend. He’s gonna clean the floor with the rest of us.” I wasn’t so sure. I mean, cars?

But sure enough, he progressed to round two and, in the third round, brought out a signature piece (I’d learn that later.) that positively devastated and walked away with the prize money. As time went on, Jack McCarthy was one of the few performers I witnessed consistently win performance competitions and the respect of the academic circles that often eschewed such scenes. His pieces are tightly constructed narrative poems, doling out sharp wit and a strong sense of empathy in equal measures. He is the curator of the Evergreen Invitational Poetry Slam, has authored multiple essays on the relationship between page, author and audience and his collection “Say Goodnight, Grace Notes (New and Corrected Poems)” is available for purchase from the author or a few of the more major booksellers around. Here, Jack talks about audience, discovering that poetry is what he wanted to do and including details of Massachusetts in his works.

Graham Isaac: Hi Jack. You've been a mainstay in the Northwest's poetry and spoken word scene for awhile now. Are you working on anything specific at the moment?

Jack McCarthy: At the moment I’m absorbed with the 5th Evergreen Invitational Poetry Slam (4/24, 7:30, Evergreen Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Marysville, WA.) We have three national and world champions coming—plus three other poets I’ve been trying to get for years. I’m doing everything I can to get them the audience they deserve.

Plus I’ve got two new books in the works and a new CD on the back burner.

GI: Sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate. You moved here from the Boston area; do you find there to be a big difference between the work produced on the East Coast and the work you find on the West Coast?

JM: Not a big difference. Eighty percent of what I hear in one place, I could just as easily have heard in the other. The Cantab (Cambridge, MA) has, week in and week out, the best open mike I’ve ever been to; Bellingham has the best one on the West Coast. The Cantab has the edge because many of the poets there have been at it a lot longer than in Bellingham—although both places have a strong student presence.

GI: How about your own work—does location play much of a part in your writing process?

JM: It did when I was in Boston; not so much here. I’m surprised how often it happens that I pull out an old poem to read in an open mike, and in reading it I find some detail of Massachusetts geography (or history) that I wish I had edited for the Washington audience.

GI: You'd written poetry casually for a long time before pursuing it actively as an artform/lifestyle. Was there an event or figure that triggered your heavier involvement?

JM: 10/8/93, I brought my daughter Annie, for her 17th birthday, to the open mike at the Cantab Lounge in Central Square, Cambridge. It was the first time either of us had been to the Cantab. Annie was already a terrific writer, and I hoped she’d get excited about poetry. I read a poem in the open mike, and they liked it. I walked out thinking, “Now I have to top it next week.” I was hooked for life. Fifty-four-years-old and I finally knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I had actually been out on the Boston scene for a couple of years back in the '70s. But there wasn’t much of a scene then, and in those two years, I didn’t meet one person that I’d want to sit down and have a cup of coffee with. I lost interest, and over the next several years wrote poems only when I felt the muse holding a gun to my head, threatening, “If you don’t write this, I’ll never give you another one.” But in 1993, the Cantab was full of interesting people, people who listened. It wasn’t anything I did; the world had changed around me. I didn’t find my voice until I found my audience.

GI: There are a lot of different forms of literature available to people. What do you think poetry specifically offers people that maybe other art forms can't provide as effectively?

JM: I can’t answer that. So I’ll answer a different question that maybe gets around to that one by a back door. A lot of poets say you should never say in a poem what can be said any other way. I, on the other hand, write poetry because my natural audience seems to be the people who are willing to come out at night for poetry. The readers I want to reach are the ones who thumb through the magazine and stop when they see writing that doesn’t go all the way to the right margin. Maybe I could have said it in a short story or an essay, a memoir; but those people would have missed it, and those are my people.

With me, it’s all about audience. That suggests that I sell something out, and maybe I do, sometimes. But in general I find—counter-intuitively—that the deeper I reach into myself and the more honest I am about what I find there, the more that people can identify with me. John Keats said, "Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." That’s one of the things I shoot for: saying the things everyone has thought, but no one has thought to say out loud.

GI: What's the best thing about Seattle's poetry community? What's the worst?

JM: The best thing is the talent: a really amazing concentration of first-rate performance poets. Thinking about my Evergreen Slam, I don’t think there’s another place in the country that could produce such a field of competitors.  I’m not saying that places like New York and LA and don’t have a lot of great people; but those scenes are so big that the poetry community tends to get fragmented. People get too big to risk their reputation in a slam they might not win. Second best is the sense of community that exists here.

Worst? I wish Seattle had an open mike scene like the Cantab, where the open mike is two hours plus, and they try very hard to get 30-36 readers in. The downside of that is that most of the audience leaves before the slam. Seattle, on the other hand, has a dynamite slam; but sometimes the audience doesn’t really get their head into the open mike, because they’ve come for the slam. People who are as audience-motivated as I am are likely to end up writing for the slam, which I think is a serious mistake.

Read Jack McCarthy's poetry and essays on poetry at his website, standupoet.net

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